Shadow born

caveck

So I've been back and forth with testing shadow born vs dying breath, but I have a pretty simple question. Does shadow born proc if the attack is not activated from stealth. Example - I drop a smoke bomb, then activate stealth. Will shadow born proc on the tic from smokebomb if it hits before my attack that I use in stealth? Because if this is the case, then I don't see how a smoke bomb tic with 100% of my base power will be very beneficial to me at all. And I always use sb + stealth to proc SoD.

coldbeer

My impression is that it proc on SB, this being the reason I use Talisman of Shadows for daze.

blur

It does proc on first Smoke bomb tick. You either have to hit encounter before first tick or between first and second tick.
On bosses u can change to ITC(if u have Press the advantage feat) to avoid that or just be fast before smoke bomb ticks trigger it.

sirjimbofrancis

Here is the situation as I see it:
1) Shadowborn WILL proc on bleed/smoke bomb tics.
2) therefore, you have to use attacks on bosses that are fast, since the bleed tics hit every second. Your encounter power you are using has to go off in less than a second. I use dazing strike and lashing blade. That means you will have good odds of getting your attack off in between tics.
3) Dying Breath pretty much only gives you an advantage in fighting mobs. The 25% crit severity, if we assume a 24% combat advantage bonus and 150% crit severity already, an arbitrary weapon damage (including power bonus) of 2000 (it doesn't really matter because that's not what dying breath affects), and a 100% crit rate, we can figure out the bonus to your damage this way using the equation:

base * (1+total crit severity+combat advantage)= damage

If we run the equation without the Dying breath feat using the numbers above, we get 5480.
With Dying Breath, we get 5980.
5980/5480= 1.091 or 9.1% increase in damage

4) Shadowborn will proc on Whirlwind of Blades and the WWoB will hold that power bonus for the full time the power bonus for WWoB lasts. That means, in combination with WWoB (assuming we hit 5 things), we can use the equation:

(1+(((buffed power * 2) + base power)/ 40000))/(1+((buffed power *2)/40000))= difference between WWoB with Shadowborn and without Shadowborn.

If we assume a base power of 30,000, a buffed power (base + buffs) of 60,000, and plug our numbers in, we would see an increase in damage of about 18.75% with the Shadowborn feat for the full duration of the WWoB buff, or about 12 seconds.

5) For me, the two feats are pretty close to a wash against mobs. My daily comes back fairly quickly, and I find that most of the mobs die off pretty fast in any case. The short amount of time mobs survive may actually make Shadowborn better as a higher damage increase over shorter time is probably better than a smaller buff over a longer stretch. The further advantage Shadowborn gives you against bosses, even if it only procs 50% of the time , makes Shadowborn the better choice IMHO. However, if you are using smoke bomb against bosses, or other encounters that are slower, then you may be getting a lot lower proc rate against bosses.

As always, my disclaimer: someone please check my math and make sure I didn't totally screw it up.